The Rise Of The Sociopath

The gender war is reaching a late-stage brainworm capacity. The brainworms of libbed-out feminist women have colonized TikTok, while the brainworms of low-status red pill men have colonized X. Nowhere is this more self-evident than in the most resentful men’s and women’s reactions to innocuous anecdotes about their lives and relationships.

Watch as they masterfully intuit extensive external details that conveniently position the poster as an evil projection of their worst encounters with the opposite sex. Schizophrenic projections should not be our normative mode of communication. We shouldn’t delight in the fracturing of the most sacred human bond that keeps the species alive.

Our Personalities Have Become Markedly More Antisocial

Do you have the sneaking suspicion that the world has become weird in the past few years? Not just in a technological sense, but in a behavioral and dispositional sense that people seem less charitable, more pessimistic, more antisocial? You’d be correct. Post-pandemic, researchers found changes in American personalities so significant they were equivalent to one-tenth of a standard deviation, or about a decade’s worth of normative personality change. So, what did the change look like?

Adults became less extroverted, agreeable, conscientious, and open to new experiences, but there were no changes in neuroticism. Younger adults, however, showed “disrupted maturity in that they increased in neuroticism and declined in agreeableness and conscientiousness.” In other words, American personalities became markedly more antisocial after the pandemic.

American personalities became markedly more antisocial after the pandemic.

As Business Insider reported, people became more unpleasant and argumentative, less diligent in their home and work lives, less likely to strike up a conversation with a stranger or call an old friend, and less excited about new things. They concluded, “COVID-19 turned us into jerks.” This research was published in 2022, and the researchers theorized, “if these changes are enduring, this evidence suggests population-wide stressful events can slightly bend the trajectory of personality, especially in younger adults.”

It seems like we're becoming an increasingly low-trust society. That’s a problem. As young people are being disincentivized to engage in relational contexts like marriage, family formation, and even just basic romantic relationships, being goaded to drop friends who “trauma dump” on them or ask them for help or just rely on them in any capacity, I can’t help but wonder: is the most radical act you can do in modern society to offer your heart and to care without any expectation of reward?

Hell Hath No Fury Like Young People Scorned

When you look around, it certainly feels behaviorally valid. The articles being churned out by respectable institutions are normalizing ideas like being embarrassed by having a boyfriend and “quiet quitting your husband.” People have grown to view basic support and emotional intimacy, both romantic and platonic, as “unpaid labor” rather than the tender, nurturing hand that flows downstream from the benevolent love and care in your heart for another person. Relationship maintenance in the form of emotional intimacy, support, and bids for connection, the building blocks of intimacy and relationship longevity, are spiritually commodified as “emotional labor” or “mankeeping.”

VICE describes mankeeping like this: “Managing his stress. Interpreting his moods. Holding his hand through feelings he won’t share with anyone else. All of it unpaid, unacknowledged, and often unreciprocated. Is it any wonder women are fed up?” If this sentiment doesn’t send chills down your spine, I beg you to recalibrate your dystopian barometer.

Framing every human bond as exploitation is to optimize for maximum spiritual isolation.

What if caring about someone’s well-being, regardless of whether it’s paid, acknowledged, or reciprocated, is just part of being an optimally functioning, socially healthy human being? Relationships aren’t “labor,” they’re magical, cosmically impossible coincidences, statistical miracles that we get to experience for a blip. The fact that we get to hurt at all is a blessing. Framing every human bond as exploitation is to optimize for maximum spiritual isolation.

If you look at online trends, men and women act like they’re not worth each other’s time unless there’s some monetary gain in it for them. You’ve got teenage wannabe Chads microdosing crystal meth as part of their “looksmaxxing” regimen, livestreaming themselves injecting their 17-year-old girlfriend with some sketchy facial fat-dissolver, then hopping on podcasts to humble women for having “super recessed maxillas.” This may be written off as the lone paraphilia of a mentally disturbed and hilariously insecure clout chaser, but what do we make of the broader trend?

It’s not just lone shock jocks or articles written by singular people. The psychic damage gets communicated to the masses like a mimetic virus, and before you know it, tens of thousands of women sincerely buy into the idea that having a boyfriend feels Republican now.

Social interactions between men and women, especially online, are antagonistic and antisocial. Men lash out at women celebrating their academic achievements, even when those achievements are PhDs at elite universities in hard science and conducting research with real-world utility. Women see a TikTok of a man’s harmless joke about how being married is the best because fresh chocolate chip banana bread randomly appears on the counter sometimes and assume she’s in an exploitative one-sided marriage.

Some of the top comments read, “Of course the woman does everything for you,” “This is probably why some women marry each other,” and “I swear some men don’t realize that they are allowed to cook and bake for themselves.” Why does such a nothingburger anecdote invite seething from women replying as if they know he treats her as a slave to exploit while contributing nothing in return? Why do women taking pride in their educational achievements invite mass scorn, derision, and schadenfreude from men on X who think everything is a feminist girlboss plot to ruin their lives?

Our default intersexual communication is being reduced to men and women with axes to grind with the opposite sex. Only someone who’s been in an asymmetrical relationship with a dusty could read into a woman doing something nice for her man as exploitation. Only a man who’s been psychologically wounded by an immature woman, someone who lured him into a false sense of safety and then rug-pulled, weaponizing his vulnerability against him, could convince himself that women pressure men to open up just so they can punish them for it.

These archetypes exist, and they are like succubi, sure, but why should your future relationships be held hostage by past hurt? We’ve all been burned by someone before, but if you’re an optimally functioning human being, you’ve learned not to nurse grudges or punish the innocent for the sins of prior opportunists.

Letting Go So You Can Move On

The question, then, is how do you let go of the tendency to keep score, let go of grudges, learn to forgive, and give to others unburdened by the fear that you’re being taken advantage of? It’s no easy task, but a crucial one if you ever want to have healthy relationships. Forgiveness and trust are powerful forces bigger than ourselves.

If you want anything real, you have to let go of the past, of the people and situations that hurt you. You have to trust that people are fundamentally good and wish to be so, even if there were many occasions people gave you reason to doubt it. Believing that, under the proper conditions, people are mostly good, is a start, and that even when they aren’t, they probably believed they had a good reason not to be.

There’s a beautiful line in Euphoria, which Ali says to Rue after she calls him to apologize for the heinous things she said to him in the heat of her descent into drug addiction, a comment she regrets. In her head, she reflects on feeling remorse for “reducing someone’s life to a moment, an ugly moment, and punishing them for it.” Ali doesn’t hesitate to forgive her. He does it immediately. Rue is humbled by his graciousness, as if it’s the first time anyone has extended her compassion. She’s brought to tears, asks sincerely, “How do you know that I mean it?” Ali responds with a bit of spiritual wisdom, “Because the hour is certain to come. So we must forgive graciously.”

If you want anything real, you have to let go of the past, of the people and situations that hurt you.

Author Autumn Christian offers a valuable perspective on how she’s learned to deal with molehills that she could make into mountains, like socks being left on the floor, after twelve years of marriage. “I see the socks on the floor. (Or trash not taken out, or some other minor irritant.) I feel the desire to be irritable and angry, unappreciated and unloved. Then I remind myself of all the ways in which I’m a horrible person, all the ways in which I’ve been annoying and inconsiderate and thoughtless and have done things that make me unlovable. That in my heart I am evil and have often committed evil with gleefulness because it feels good to hurt someone.”

This is harsh, and some object that it borders on shame and self-hatred, but it does tap into something real and honorable. “Then I apologize to God and existence itself for being irritated at someone else’s failure when I have so many ways in which to improve upon myself. That I dared to be irritated when I too do so many little irritating things that my husband simply chooses to not make a big deal. Then I pick up the socks and force myself to internally express gratitude for this opportunity presented to me to become better and excise some of the evil inside of me.”

This is beautiful. A call to bite your tongue when you feel righteous indignation and repent for your own failings. It’s an honorable way to conduct yourself in a committed relationship and reflects the gold standard of relationship science that the Gottmans have spent decades unpacking through marital research.

Gottman Research: Are You Really a Saint?

Successful couples respond to bids for connection and, in response to conflict, make repair attempts. Here, Autumn’s doing a repair attempt before the rupture even happens and redirects it into a positive sentiment: an opportunity to express gratitude and recognize her own faults. The most successful couples attribute mistakes and failures to situations, while those at high risk for divorce make character judgments. And this ethos of humility is what the Gottmans have found makes for stable marriages: a charitability towards one another, viewing each other as the union of two flawed people trying their best.

Dr. John and Julie Gottman are American psychologists who run The Gottman Institute, which has developed a reputable method of predicting which couples will divorce with 93.6 percent accuracy. They’ve found that the couples who thrive aren’t the ones who never get annoyed or fight, but who refuse to let small irritants calcify into character judgments. Autumn is successfully short-circuiting one of the biggest relationship killers: habitual negative interpretations of neutral behavior, known as negative sentiment override.

When you get stuck in negative habitual interpretations, socks on the floor quickly codes into “he doesn’t respect me,” but she’s resisting the impulse to let the feeling metastasize and, importantly, avoids falling into the four-horsemen trap of criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling, which are the greatest predictors of divorce. Residual emotions from every interaction accumulate over time, and when resentments pile up, a partner hangs on to past experiences, like feeling unimportant or uncared for, and begins to perceive their partner’s behavior through a negative filter, known as negative sentiment override.

When a couple has so much goodwill towards one another that neutral behavior is interpreted as positive or harmless, that’s positive sentiment override. If their partner forgets to take out the trash, they assume they were tired or forgot, not that they don’t respect them. If they were snappy, they grant they’re probably just having a bad day. This positive bias is important because it allows couples to de-escalate conflict faster, they’re less likely to engage in the four horsemen, and they stay together at higher rates.

Micro-moments of warmth keep relationships from rotting. Responding to bids for connection, engaging in rituals of gratitude, and making repair attempts following conflict keep the relationship bank full. In turn, they make a couple more inclined to see each other positively because they have cultivated emotional goodwill through trust and nurturing.

Couples who thrive aren’t the ones who never get annoyed or fight, but who refuse to let small irritants calcify into character judgments.

Interestingly, our culture emboldens the opposite responses, encouraging us to criticize our partners for their failings, to be defensive when they ask more of us, to stonewall when we feel unhappy rather than communicate, and when all of the resentment has built up to a fever pitch, exhibit contempt towards our significant others through a feeling of superiority. When our partner fails, we default to writing accusatory think pieces or rambling one-sided TikToks. We rarely feel compelled to do honest self-reflection on the ways we’ve fallen short and the more charitable explanations for our partner’s behavior.

One of the reasons this happens is because of a powerful cognitive bias known as the fundamental attribution error. It’s the tendency to evaluate your own successes characterologically and your failures contextually, but evaluate other people’s successes contextually and their failures characterologically. Essentially, when we do good, we give ourselves credit, and when we come up short, we give ourselves the benefit of the doubt (I’m late not because I don’t care, but because I got stuck in traffic).

We don’t tend to extend the same courtesy to others. If other people are late, it’s because they’re disrespectful. If they show up on time, they’re just doing their job. So, we have a tendency to think highly of ourselves and critically of others. Imagine how this maps onto relationships. One of the best ways to overcome this bias is to consciously reverse the attribution, giving other people the benefit of the doubt and being harder and stricter on yourself.

As Orian Taraban explains, “This creates generosity in interpersonal relationships, and this is generally well received. It makes people like you more, and by being harder and stricter with yourself, you give yourself the opportunity to grow and develop as a person.” He adds, “With the right attitude, you can see your failings as an opportunity for growth over which you have some measure of control and responsibility.” They become fuel for your own self-improvement.

Extrapolating Gottman’s Research Onto the Current Dating Market

The same cognitive biases that destroy marriages apply to people who’ve opted out of the dating market entirely, just on a different scale. Instead of applying cynicism to one partner, it’s applied to an entire sex. One bad relationship or date gets extrapolated onto all members as a monolith. One situationship that fizzles becomes “men only use you for sex.” One rejection becomes “women have delusional standards.” Neutral or negative interactions register as hostile, and the contempt Gottman links to divorce because of its corrosive emotional weight mutates into an ideology toward dating itself, they sometimes even give it a fancy academic term like heterofatalism.

In the dating field, contempt might not mutate into divorce but into an ideological defense mechanism. The fundamental attribution error the Gottmans warn about becomes the default lens. People who’ve sworn off dating or pathologized the dating market aren’t wrong to feel burned by bad experiences, but they’re often stuck in the same emotional climate as couples in late-stage relational decay. There are no repair attempts, no generous interpretations, just a self-fulfilling prophecy confirming its own pessimism.

There are no repair attempts, no generous interpretations, just a self-fulfilling prophecy confirming its own pessimism.

You don’t need to be a punching bag or give people endless chances. But taking more responsibility and extending others the benefit of the doubt will set you free. You’ll feel lighter once you stop hauling around the emotional baggage of past hurt. You’ll be in a healthier headspace to form new connections because you won’t assume the worst from the outset. When you’re not interested, you can walk away without venom or bitterness taking hold of your heart. You can go on a bad date and walk away while genuinely wishing them well. The most radical act in the modern world is not to be a sociopath.

Closing Thoughts

The hour is certain to come. Your looks will fade, your heart will harden, injustices will compound. Options will wither, doors of opportunity will close. Time will march on and biological realities fester. Hairlines recede, wrinkles etch into skin, and wombs become barren. Nature is ruthless. It will feel a lot more ruthless if you don’t start cultivating goodwill and extending grace. I’m sure you have great reasons to harden your heart, to distrust, to be suspicious, but are you so innocent? Have you not been quick to anger, have you not turned away at times from someone who was begging to get closer? Have you not, for every grievance, built up an equally sizable debt of neglect?